Losing Sleep

I was out with an old friend of mine the other day who works in IT. I love my friend and if there was anybody that I would trust my computer with, it would be him. Actually I wouldn’t because he’s a Windows guy and I’m a Mac guy, but you get the idea. We were talking about open source and web 2.0 and he made a comment that went something like this, “It’s nice stuff, but we would never use it because it’s not professional.” The funny thing is that I’ve heard this same comment twice now in the past two weeks from IT people. Then I also ran into this post while I was reading through my library feeds.
Specifically the part about “a number of you would like ‘IT’ to either provide support or get out of the way so you can provide it yourselves.”

I’m thoroughly confused. What is “professional?” Do you have to pay 10k or more for a site license for a product to be professional? Does it have to be created by a stock trading corporation for it to be professional? I would really like somebody to explain this to me because I’m not sure I get it. Me personally… I would use whatever tools are at hand, and if it doesn’t work the way you want it to, get under the hood and figure out how to make it. Of course you can’t necessarily do that with proprietary software.

Another feed that caught my attention was something that was posted by Will Richardson and the comments that followed. Basically it was a post about BlackBoard and how schools are using to to create the same functionality that you would get from a blog, wiki, etc, only in a controlled environment. I don’t know what pricing is on BlackBoard, but I’m willing to bet that it’s more than my left kidney is worth. (It actually depends on the number of students that you have at your school, but the site still won’t give you an actual price.) Why would schools choose to use a expensive, proprietary, closed system over a free, nonproprietary, open system? I haven’t read any studies on the security of BlackBoard and I don’t know what is involved in administrating a BlackBoard site but I do know that the security of an open source wiki is dependent on: your webserver, your database server, and your code. With an open source wiki (my own experience being with Mediawiki.) the administrator is in complete control. I wonder if that is part of the problem? Do web administrators want to pass the buck so to speak? I’m not a coder, but I was able to figure out how to lock down a wiki to a few dozen people just by researching through support sites and forums to find the snippets of code needed to make the software do what you want. Is it any more secure than BlackBoard? I honestly don’t know, but I’ve also searched for security issues with Mediawiki and like I said before, it’s how you administrate your webserver, your database server, and your code. As far as I can tell, if those are handled badly you will have problems all over the place.

I wouldn’t want an IT person’s job because they have to put up with a lot of crap. I’ve seen plenty of times when they are the hero of the hour and I commend them for that. I’ve been rescued a few times by IT people and I’ll gladly buy them a beer for that. On the other hand… I’ve also seen problems caused by IT. I understand that you can’t give everybody what they want, but I also think that just because a person doesn’t know how to do something, other people shouldn’t be punished for it. There needs to be some trust put in the user. Work with the user to try to implement new things (not to mention that a user might actually be able to teach IT something).